5 - The network of marriage

Summary

In 1654 the barrister Antonio Ruiz de Salcedo, son of a man who had come from his native Baza to Granada to serve as accountant of the Resettlement Junta, acquired the old veinticuatría of Mateo de Lisón y Biedma. In 1662 he consolidated his position as one of the ruling elite of the city by marrying Lorenza, daughter of the jurado Felipe López de Zúñiga, who had made his fortune in the silk trade. Antonio's father turned over to his son at the wedding some vineyards and grain land which he had bought in 1636 in the Vega of Granada and two cortijos in the grain-rich Montes, together with a wayside inn nearby. He also purchased for Antonio a collection of books on law. The bride brought as her dowry a newly built mansion in the increasingly fashionable parish of San Justo, together with furnishings like the bed with its drapes of velvet and damask, valued at 3,500 reales (more than the 2,800 at which the eleven-year-old slave girl was priced), and a carriage drawn by two mules, worth 7,000. The whole dowry was estimated at 13,000 ducats, nearly a half of it in cash. It had been 16,000 ducats which the previous holder of the Ruiz de Salcedo veinticuatría, Lisón y Biedma, was promised at his marriage to the daughter of Alonso de Contreras, alderman of Motril, in 1601, including some familiar items: the marriage bed of damask, valued at 4,000 reales (and which was in pawn for debt at Lisón's death forty years later!), and an eighteen-year-old Berber slave girl and an eleven-year-old slave boy valued together at the same price as the bed.